Wireless communication services for mobile vehicles, such as navigation and roadside assistance, have increased rapidly in recent years and are expanding into new service areas. Most available telematics services apply to a motor vehicle in operation, but more recently, the demands and potential for communication, networking and diagnostic services have grown. Currently, the user who is outside the vehicle can control only a few vehicle and telematics functions, such as unlocking a door and setting or disabling a car alarm, with a wireless key or remote.
A system that offers greater customization and a larger variety of vehicle settings and service available to the user outside the vehicle would be of interest to many vehicle owners or to multiple users of the same vehicle. In such a system, these service and functions could include many more features than simply unlocking the car doors, features such as storing personalized comfort settings, running maintenance and diagnostic functions, accessing call-center information, updating controller systems, retrieving vehicle location, controlling the vehicle alarm, defrosting the windows in cold weather, and even placing telephone calls to talk or to transmit digital information from personal digital assistants (PDAs) and similar hand-held devices through a remote device. While inside or outside of the vehicle, the user would be able to change or increase services to the vehicle with relative ease of configuration and have greater anti-theft security. Services and system capabilities could be personalized, upgraded or changed with little or no change to the vehicle infrastructure, and potentially require no keyboard input or button pushing. The functions of the device could be key or voice-activated, and sufficiently compact for the user to conveniently carry in a purse or in a pocket. The system might even provide similar functionality as hand-held devices such as PDAs and cellular phones.
It is an object of this invention, therefore, to provide a system, device, and method to access and control functions of a mobile vehicle from inside or outside of the vehicle while adding enhanced features, personalization, data management, security and accessibility, and to overcome the deficiencies and obstacles described above.